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World domination: One step closer

Our fearless leader is beginning a fortnight of guest blogging over at Jezebel! This is an explosion of awesome, as you’ve probably guessed, since Jezebel has lately been one of the most reliable blogs around for feminist news (often with a fat-friendly slant) as well as pictures of Zachary Quinto.

This means that Kate won’t be posting quite as much over here as usual, but the rest of us are still around (though busy and be-jobbed and unreliable about posting and all that). And, of course, you can still get your usual dose of Kate at Jez and at Broadsheet.

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25 thoughts on “World domination: One step closer”

That sounds like a fun short-term project. I’ll defintely look for her articles. I don’t read too many of the articles there, since celebrity stuff doesn’t much interest me, but I go there every day just to look at the WONDERFUL pictures they post of women living their lives. Since I started looking at the site I realized how rare just plain old happy photos of women doing regular stuff there are in the media, as opposed to celebrities or women being used to sell something. It’s a joy.

For those who don’t normally read Jez, just a quick warning – Sanity Watchers applies in the comments to posts about fat.

B – The headlines on the celebrity snap judgement photos are snarky, but the ones of non celebrity women going about their lives usually aren’t, and the photos are gorgeous. I don’t know when you stopped reading, but I started reading again a few months ago when it was inexplicably the only blog not blocked by my company’s web filter, and (IMO) it’s gotten a lot more feminist recently.

Yeah, I should have mentioned that: there are a lot of good folks over there who will argue for FA (and there’s a “no body snarking” rule for comments), but there’s always someone who is Just So Concerned About Health and whatnot. There are way more FA101 arguments than you might have the stomach for.

Becky – Maybe it’s time to give them a second chance. I read for a year and took them off my reader a few months ago for a mix of reasons. A huge problem for me was how many posts the put up a day — and so many of them were irrelevant (celebrity gossip). It became too much of a time suck on my reader.

And quite often I found the writers to be judgmental of women’s choices that don’t fit their mold. For instance, I don’t consider myself to be a bad person for recently deciding to try more natural birth control methods, as a monogamous woman in a steady 8-year relationship, but their writers frequently dismiss that choice as irresponsible and flat out dumb. On one hand, they advocate for women’s right to manage their health and on the other, they dismiss any option that’s not jezebel approved. This is just one example of how I find them to be rather anti-feminist at times. Their writing on sex workers is another.

Wow – It seems I had something to get off my chest. I’m happy that you say they may have turned a corner, because I very much enjoyed Jezebel before I got fed up. I’m looking forward to reading Kate’s contributions.

In Memorial Hospital, New Orleans, after Hurricane Katrina, Emmett Everett, a 380-pound paraplegic patient who was alert, talking, and in good spirits died, allegedly as a result of a lethal dose of drugs administered by a doctor. Why? The doctor felt that, because of his size, his evacuation from the hospital would be too difficult and time-consuming for the medical personnel and rescue workers. A grand jury refused to indict the doctor. This is a long article, but please read it. Please blog about it. Please get this story out there. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/30/magazine/30doctors.html?_r=1&hpw

I love Kate but I do NOT like that site. Partly it’s the celebrity thing since I don’t really invest much in that subject, but the site itself reminds me of trying to read the Gateworld forums where every single post has macros and images and tag lines and whatnot. I have trouble telling the difference between actual content and interstitial junk.

I stopped reading Jezebel when the furore with Metafilter went down – y’know, when they decided exploiting a woman’s story regarding rape after being explicitly asked not to by the woman herself was okay.

I have my qualms with jezebel. Every once in awhile gothic lolita fashion gets splayed up there where the actual jezebel writers and also in the comments they like to tell us how our knee socks are “derailing feminism” and clearly we’re wearing our frumpy modest knee length garb “for sexual attention” etc and so forth. One of the most close minded sites on the net. hate it.

I stopped reading a LONG time ago, myself. I couldn’t take the anti-fat and the “feminism” either. It was around the time when “Slutmachine” (her name, not my choice of names for her) posted about not telling partners about having herpes because everyone gets it at some point or another (this was at least a year ago). That was it for me. I keep hearing that things are better, but whenever I click over, it looks like the same old shit to me. I don’t have time to keep up with my blog reading as it is. Not having them on my reader isn’t hurting me or my feminism.

Having said all of that, I hope that Kate is able to bring some of the goodness to them and that it gets heard.

Yeah, I just used up my Sanity Watchers points reading comments on Kate’s piece on “the war on childhood obesity.” One commenter declares herself to be a “medical professional” and states unequivocally that obese people are not healthy. She says “chubby” is OK, but “obese” is not. And what is her definition of obesity? According to her, “I know it when I see it.”

I wanted to reply and tell her that I, a size 16, have a BMI in the “obese” category, even though most people would likely consider me just “chubby.” Oh, and I have no “obesity-related” health problems, either. But then I figured, what’s the point? I may as well argue with a dining room table, as Barney Frank says.

Geez, I can hardly believe the load of Stupid (well, perhaps of Misinformed, rather) being thrown at Kate’s arguments in the Jezebel comments. “But but but everyone noes teh fat iz unhealthy and must. be. stopped!!11!”

They had been getting much more feminist and FA-friendly in both posts and comments lately, but today seems to be a real letdown. If you’ve got SW points today, you might wade in — but if not, just read the posts and skip the comments.

Weirdly, the post I did later on girls and body image — in which I got all THIS IS WHAT THE FUCKING OBESITY CRISIS HYPE HATH WROUGHT — is getting almost 100% positive comments. I don’t know if it’s a different group of commenters at a different time of day, or if it’s all in how you phrase it, or what.

I’ve been reading Jezebel for about 6 months or so. What I’ve noticed is that the comments that use up your Sanity Points tend to come from people who aren’t regular posters. You’ll only hear from them on specific topics, and more often than not, they’ll have something negative or contradictory to say.

Then, some of them tend to be people that came over from other Gawker sites(which are often populated with male-privileged assholes and the women who take it**), and don’t fully grasp how things roll at Jezebel. It’s like how Kate will post at Salon, or an interview with Magazine X will link to here, and you have to lay the pre-emptive verbal smackdown before they start shit.

But for the most part, it’s not bad at all. A lot of them still need to learn that when a marginalized group is being spotlighted and you are a privileged party, you really should watch what you say. There tends to be Epic Headdesking when the short and tall, but still thin, women try to threadjack the plus-size clothing threads…or when the curly-headed white women take over the African-American hair articles. Universalizing experiences marginalizes more than it helps.

**Seriously, I consider myself a geek, but I’ll be damned if I ever set foot in io9 again. The misogyny there is soul-sucking.